


Ashes in the Dust

by GillO



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: F/M, Season/Series 06
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-02
Updated: 2015-05-02
Packaged: 2018-03-28 18:15:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3864829
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GillO/pseuds/GillO
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Spike tries to sort out what's left after Riley trashed his crypt. He's not a happy vampire.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ashes in the Dust

Spike really didn’t give a toss about most of his things. Lose some, get more had been his philosophy for a century or so. Owning stuff was a concept his beloved grandsire had beaten out of him and fucked out of Dru in his very early days, and he’d known better than to campaign against the pillock. 

Even so, the charred and charcoaled state of his crypt was depressing. That cosy gold bedspread he’d used to give the Slayer a memorable seeing-to, for example – no more than ash and flakes of fibre. His sexy candles, all slimed down the walls. His box of Slayer kit, bashed about enough by her, yes, but pulled together and hoarded even so, now a great glob of melted plastic and flaky fragments among which a perky smile or a single hazel eye looked just weird. And depressing.

He kicked stuff around, irritable as hell. Sodding Soldier Boy had blown into town, wrecked his pad, wrecked his useful little deal, wrecked his relationship. OK, can that – who was he kidding? Wrecked his bloody sex life at least.

What was left now? Bugger all, really. Of his place, his unlife, his pathetic excuse for a personality, all blown to bleeding smithereens. But there was still the box. The Box, really, the way he thought of it. It held old papers and somehow, amazingly, it had gone with him through well over a century, round Europe, round Dear Olde, round the bloody Colonies. He’d stashed it in a bank when things looked to be going pear-shaped, but got it out again in 1918, 1945, 1962. And, somehow, improbably as ever, it had survived yet again.

He lifted and cradled the thing, blowing off dust and a fine layer of ash. Who said he didn’t breathe? His lungs worked fine when he needed them, thank you very much.  
The gentle blow, to be honest all he could really manage without a lot of effort, hadn’t cleared all the mess away, though. He prepared to rub his hand across to clear the rest, then stopped, looking closer. Outlined in grey on the polished wood was a pattern, one that was familiar from TV though he’d never paid much attention before – a fingerprint.

He measured his own flat, broad thumb up against the mark. Nope, nothing like his. This was smaller, daintier. Feminine. 

If his heart could beat his pulse would have been racing. With enormous care he prised up the lid, making sure he did not disturb the evidence. The contents looked fine at first glance; a layer of letters addressed in careful copperplate lay above a couple of sepia photographs – God, Dru had looked hot in that black lace back in Chicago – and beneath these sheets of foxed paper inscribed by his own fair hand, heavily crossed-out, best forgotten frankly. And beneath those feeble effusions, the letter he’d written, never meaning to send, the most honest thing he’d written since the late 1870s. Was not there.

A chipped vampire can still make a mess of stuff, especially when it’s all crap. He can still roar and punch the wall and exhaust his vocabulary of carefully-gathered obscenities from around the world. But what he cannot do, bloody sodding bugger it to hell, is get back something stolen which reveals the innermost part of him, from eyeballs to entrails, heart and absent soul. His crypt, already a mess, looked like a disaster zone without the humour. And he collapsed in the end, kneeling on the floor, tears flowing as they hadn’t since that night with the bitch Goddess.

And back in her house Buffy wiped her tears, blew her nose and picked up the letter she’d taken along with her when she’d said goodbye.

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for the Halloween Challenge at Live journal comm SB Fag Ends.


End file.
